The end of Idlehacker
Idlehacker is no more. This is the end.
I feel a fraud to even carry it on, being that I have failed so dismally in my idling. I was closer than I thought when I started this website but have since been crushed and injected with caffeine to such a degree that it would take some pretty serious cold turkey living to get back. It may yet happen, and the site may return - but until then, adieu.
Working long hours damages the brain
via Metro
We work some of the longest hours in Europe but while staying late should make the boss happy it increases the risk of dementia later in life.
The stress and exhaustion of working overtime can harm the brain’s ability to process information, a study suggests.
Middle-aged workers putting in 55 hours or more a week had poorer brain function than those who clocked up 40 hours.
Their scores were lower on tests to measure intelligence, short-term memory and word recall, according to research at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health.
Fuck Wit
I was doing my Christmas shopping and came across a book called ‘F**k It. The Ultimate Spiritual Way’. I flicked through the book and whilst I haven’t read it, so can’t give it a proper review, alarm bells ring and a bandwagon chugs nearby when you read things like this:
John C. Parkin argues that saying Fuck It is a spiritual act: That it is the perfect western expression of the eastern ideas of letting go, giving up and finding real freedom by realising that things don’t matter so much (if at all).
In a PDF book i linked to a while ago Max Nathan wrote: ‘A few years ago, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote an instructive guide on ‘How to Be an Intellectual Giant’. Amongst the advice on tone, subject niche, demeanour, how to title one’s first book and cadge the next newspaper column, Brooks includes one crucial insight: be wrong. But be wrong in the right way – ideas should be eye-catching and controversial enough to get everyone paying attention. That way lies fame, or at least infamy.’
What I always find irritating is that books like ‘How to be Free’ and other idling literature is filed under humour, as if we don’t mean it. Yet the moment you throw in ’spiritual’ bullshit it becomes a self help book. So John C. Parkin is right but in the wrong way. Whist much of eastern philosophy is about taking the path of least resistance, and it does chime with some of my own thinking, I can’t remeber reading about Zhuangzi or Confucius trying to flog chocolate:
Whatever’s bothering you, say Fuck It and tuck into this delicious bar of milk chocolate. Fuck It chocolate is brand new and only available from here. Say Fuck It and order a whole box.
Brilliant - especially in light of stories like this…
And as if you couldn’t guess already, this is his biog…
John C. Parkin said Fuck It to his life in London as an advertising executive to set up the holistic centre ‘The Hill That Breathes’ in Italy with his wife Gaia. John is a longstanding student of shamanism and Chi Kung. He teaches courses on breathing at his beautiful centre set in the Tuscan hills.
I’m currently writing my own book called Cunt…
To finish off, watch his YouTube video
Go with the flow…
from The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Mr. Honda to Toru:
“It’s not a question of better or worse. The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you’re supposed to go up and down when you’re supposed to go down. When you’re supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you are supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there’s no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up.”
From the Writings of Kwang-tze: Book XV (Kho Î, or ‘Ingrained Ideas)
2. In accordance with this it is said, ‘The sage is entirely restful, and so (his mind) is evenly balanced and at ease. This even balance and ease appears in his placidity and indifference. In his stillness his virtue is the same as that of the Yin, and in movement his diffusiveness is like that of the Yang. He does not take the initiative in producing either happiness or calamity. He responds to the influence acting on him, and moves as he feels the pressure. He rises to act only when he is obliged to do so. He discards wisdom and the memories of the past; His life seems to float along; his death seems to be a resting.
An Idler’s Glossary
A new book by Joshua Glenn and Mark Kingwell, An Idler’s Glossary, “examines the etymology and history of over two hundred idler-specific terms and phrases” and “aims not merely to correct popular misconceptions about idling, but to serve as a preliminary foundation for a new mode of thinking about working and not-working”.
You can read some extracts from the book here…
And if you’re in Brooklyn next month, and why should you be?, you can celebrate the launch of the book with Cabinet magazine.
Credit Crunch Party Time!
It seems that my Idling is not going so well. Months without a post, working all the time and getting ever more sucked into the maelstrom of conforming to the puritan work ethic. But there are challenges in every idlers life. The system won’t allow you to just float away, or lie on a sofa all day. Oh no! The system is pissed off. The system thinks “I work in a job I hate! why shouldn’t you” and “That’s life - tough shit!”, and I’m ashamed to say I find myself joining in occasionally, with phrases like “Bloody students!” and other nonesense like that.
However, it seems nature (or man’s greed and stupidity) has it’s own tricks to help the lonesome idler. This time, it’s the credit crunch. Aside from the fact they’ve managed to brand an economic downturn and sell biscuits and other shit on the back of it, it might well force a lot of people into idling. As more people find themselves out of work and out of pocket, the stigma of being an idler will start to lift as people find themselves in the same boat - however, you’re prepared; You know how to live on £20 a week, you don’t even like going on holidays, you hate driving and love walking, you hate shopping. In short you’ll be like an inverse of the ‘entrepeneurial’ property twats of the 90s and early 00s. You can have a smug grin because you actually don’t even want to work!
For those who do manage to keep a job, it gets better - as is common in recession, we will see much more shorter working weeks. Brilliant! - if you’ve followed my blog (see here,here and here) you know I’m all for this anyway.
So in short, take pleasure in the Credit Crunch, bask in the recession, because my friends, the age of the idler is upon us! Rise Up (or just lie down…)
Note to Self: Let Things Be…
For some reason I decided to mess with the Idlehacker website and upgrade wordpress (the thing it runs on) and it didn’t work. So I had to restore it from a backup and I lost a few of the little details that make it that little bit nicer. Being lazy, it’s taken me a while to fix it but I’m going to try and redesign it in the coming weeks.
Also, you may have seen the first post from Idlehacker’s new writer Gabriel Culot, a Philosophy student living in Italy. His first post is great so check it out!
Idlehacker’s New Writer Defends Being an Idler…
Contrary to common belief, being idle is a task that requires a full commitment, and a lot of time and concentration.
To an external observer, the mere sight of a healthy young man of working age, sitting on the banks of a river, or leaning against a wall and looking around with no care in the world, will seem like a shame, a waste of talent and productive potential, or simply an injustice.
Most “active” people consider the idleness of others as a personal offence. It seems to them as if the idle fellow has decided to sit in that precise spot, with that precise expression on his face, for the pleasure he takes from bothering decent, active people. He must be there, they are sure, because he is evil. Only an evil person, rotten to the core, in their opinion, would take pleasure in imposing his scandalous habits on decent working folk.
But is that true?
Has it always been so?
The answer obviously is no.
People get nervous when they see idlers in their path because the idler is able to perform a task that many have completely forgot, or worse, have never learnt.
An idler can take his own time. An idler can clear his mind. Whilst being idle, if he is actually being idle and not wasting time between one task and another, he is in a state that might be compared, very humbly of course, to a form of meditation, that in some cases can become very deep.
Many people have no idea of how this is done anymore. If they have a few free minutes, or an afternoon, or a week, or any amount of time to themselves, they will probably try to organize it, make schedules, try to use that time to do something useful…
In most cases though, they will dread any idleness, as if it was poison, the only exception being the summer holidays when many people try forcing themselves to calm down by spending a lot of money to go to the other side of the world and spend a few weeks in a resort, where, just in case they should feel the urge to be active, there is an army of entertainers, and activities to be done.
Shame on our world for having forgot how to take it easy.
Greek philosophers used to teach their lessons to their pupils whilst walking about the agora, or even better, they would discuss at symposiums, the equivalent of a conversation lasting all night, and lubricated by a lot of wine (symposium derives from συν-πίνω, witch would mean “drinking together”…).
Also the Romans, who were far more active and busy than the Greeks, understood how any human being needs to take his time and we have many literary examples of how they were able to do so. I’d say the most eloquent might be Seneca’s “de tranquillitate animi”.
But enjoying their time, wasn’t only prerogative of the rich and noble in Rome, at a certain moment, there were more festive days in the calendar than regular working days…
And on history could go citing men that did much good being what we would call passive, like Gandhi or Jesus (how many people today do you think would trust a guy who spent forty days in the desert doing nothing?), and very active men who did a lot of damage to their kind, like the incredible amount of dictators last century gave birth to.
I hope I will have the chance to go into more detail on these topics in further articles, and now, before I go for a walk, I feel obliged to publicly thank David for the opportunity he gave me to give my small contribution to the cause of idleness.
Gabriel Culot
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Idlehacker brings tips, tricks, diversions, tools, nuggets and other stuff to amuse and support the idler in their lives of laziness, fun and hedonism.
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